This section describes approaches that could be employed, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or employed. Hence, unless explicitly specified otherwise, any approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application, and any approaches described in this section are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
A multimode mesh network is a mesh network having one or more network devices (“nodes”) that can support more than one link layer interface. For example, a node in a mesh network may support one or more physical/link layer interfaces operating under different prescribed link layer access protocols such as IEEE802.15.4 (g/e/ . . . ), IEEE802.15.1 (Bluetooth), Long Term Evolution (LTE), WiFi-Direct, LTE-Direct, WiFi, and/or and Power Line Communication (PLC, IEEE1901). A network device in an IoT network can be implemented as a temperature sensor, a smart meter, a video surveillance camera, an actuator device on a robot, and/or a physical controller switch, etc. Each link layer access protocol specifies a prescribed discovery operation comprising a sequence of operations that need to be performed to enable a network device to acquire and establish a communication link with another network device according to a prescribed access technology, for example channel discovery and negotiation, time slot synchronization, frame boundary alignment, etc.